Journalist and historian Susan Jacoby talks with Bill about the role secularism and intellectual curiosity have played throughout America’s history, a topic explored in her new book, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought.

“I’m sure there are plenty of atheists and various kinds of unorthodox religious people in Congress, but they don’t talk about it,” Jacoby tells Bill. “I think that either proclaiming allegiance to a religion or shutting up about it is still an absolute requirement.”

In Austin, Texas, fifteen people influence what is taught to the next generation of American children. Once every decade, the highly politicized Texas State Board of Education rewrites the teaching and textbook standards for its nearly 5 million schoolchildren. And when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas affects the nation as a whole. Don McLeroy, a dentist, Sunday school teacher, and avowed young-earth creationist, leads the Religious Right charge. After briefly serving on his local school board, McLeroy was elected to the Texas State Board of Education and later appointed chairman. During his time on the board, McLeroy has overseen the adoption of new science and history curriculum standards, drawing national attention and placing Texas on the front line of the so-called "culture wars."

The PBS show Independent Lens, which airs a different original documentary film every week is featuring The Revisionaries, the Religious Right's efforts to transform public education in Texas beginning on Monday, January 28, 2013. Local broadcast dates and times will vary. Check your PBS station schedule.

In 2004, the Dover school board ordered science teachers to read a statement to high school biology students suggesting that there is an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution called intelligent design–the idea that life is too complex to have evolved naturally and therefore must have been designed by an intelligent agent. The teachers refused to comply. Later, parents opposed to intelligent design filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing the school board of violating the constitutional separation of church and state.
"There was a blow-up like you couldn't believe," Bill Buckingham, head of the school board's curriculum committee, tells NOVA. Buckingham helped formulate the intelligent-design policy when he noticed that the biology textbook chosen by teachers for classroom use was, in his words, "laced with Darwinism."

Laced with Darwinism. Gasp! The next thing you know, physics will be laced with Einstein, too!

After a tumultuous decade that featured death threats and bullet-proof vests as well as a wedding to his partner of 25 years, Bishop Gene Robinson will be stepping down from his seat on December 31 of this year. But his work continues.

Yes, David Barton had entitled his book The Jefferson Lies with absolutely no sense of irony whatsoever. Remarkable.

Casey Francis Harrell, the director of corporate communications at the publishing firm, said that, due to a spate of recent complaints, Thomas Nelson had “lost confidence in the book’s details.” The Jefferson Lies, a New York Times bestseller, has been pulled from Thomas Nelson’s website, and the company has asked online retailers to cease offering the work to the public. The cessation came only two days after NPR’s “All Things Considered” ran a stinging commentary of Barton’s work.

Barton told Thomas Kidd of World Magazine that the publisher’s decision was a “strange scenario,” and that he’d only been notified of the move by email.

The book, which purports to illuminate Jefferson’s Christian leanings and the biblical influence on the Constitution’s creation, has been the subject of critique from much of academia since its release earlier this year, such that the History News Network deemed the book the “least credible book in print.” However, unlike many of Barton’s previous offerings, the averse reaction to The Jefferson Lies has crossed the political and religious spectrum.

Metaxas is not yet a household name, but this has certainly been his year. He was not only the keynote speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast where president Obama also spoke; he also succeeded the late Charles Colson—both as the voice of the nationally-syndicated radio commentary, Breakpoint, and as one of the three-member board of directors of the premier US conservative Catholic/evangelical alliance, The Manhattan Declaration.

As an up and coming evangelical leader, he has also been busy denouncing proposed federal regulations on contraception coverage in employer insurance packages. But he is unique in employing his status as a Bonhoeffer scholar to claim parallels between the regulations and early Nazi-era legislation, as he did, for example, in an appearance on MSNBC.

Before hosting Focal Point, Bryan Fischer was the chaplain of the Idaho State Senate and the head of the Idaho chapter of the American Family Association.

Published: June 14, 2012

In April, Mitt Romney hired Richard Grenell, an openly gay man, to serve as his campaign's national security spokesman. Within hours, Grenell was being attacked by a Christian radio talk show host named Bryan Fischer, whose Focal Point call-in show reaches more than a million listeners a day.

Nine days after Fischer began his on-air attack, Grenell resigned. He had been the only openly gay member of Romney's campaign staff.

The Christian right and Bryan Fischer saw Grenell's resignation as a "tremendous victory," says New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer.

Yale Divinity School's Facebook page has posted a link on American Magazine's website, which is not working as the time of this RRW post. The YDS post reads in part:

Book by Margaret Farley, RSM, Condemned by Vatican. Prof. Emerita Farley says her book "Just Love" was not intended to express “current official Catholic teaching” but rather to help people “think through their questions about human sexuality,” in response to a Vatican charge that her book “affirms positions that are in direct contradiction with Catholic teaching in the field of sexual morality.” The Vatican, through its Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, sent an official “Notification” released in Rome today.

For many people there will be a strong temptation to dismiss Barton’s book as an unimportant “fringe” argument that professional historians and political thinkers need not take seriously. After all, Barton essentially ignores the views of all the standard sources on Jefferson’s religious philosophy, he creates a straw man that few professional historians will take seriously and he presents a view of Jefferson as essentially a conventional and devout Christian that virtually no other major Jefferson scholar will endorse.

But it would be a profound error to underestimate the destructive influence of Barton’s deeply deceptive portrait of Jefferson. Within the alternative culture of conservative Christianity—one that includes thousands of Churches and hundreds of Christian academies across America and millions of home-schooled children—Barton’s book will quickly become the “definitive” work on Jefferson—one that his readers will accept as proving that literally all academic historians are bald-faced, cynical liars and that Thomas Jefferson was essentially a conservative Christian very much like themselves. On this basis, they will feel entirely justified and comfortable in rejecting all serious histories of Jefferson out of hand and dismissing all mainstream explanations of his religious philosophy as cynical atheist propaganda that has been “completely and totally refuted” by Barton’s book.

Barton's depiction of Jefferson's faith as one that today's conservative Christians would be comfortable with is suspect in light of some Christian leaders' reaction to Jefferson in his own day:

+On July 4th, 1798, President of Yale, Rev. Timothy Dwight, preached that Christians dare not support "the philosophers, the atheists and the deists" in the coming election, including Thomas Jefferson, who was running for President. Dwight proclaimed that "our churches may become temples of reason" should Jefferson win the election. (see The Godless Constitution, by Isaac Kramnick & R. Laurance Moore.)

+Rev. David Caldwell on July 30, 1788, stated that the Constitution's abolition of religious tests (religious qualifications, or tests, were common in Europe) was, heaven forbid, "an invitation for Jews and pagans of every kind to come among us." (See " Original Intent," by Susan Jacoby in Mother Jones magazine. Also see here.)

+Rev. William Linn, a Dutch Reformed minister, authored an anti-Jefferson tract in 1800 complaining about Jefferson's "disbelief of the Holy Scriptures; or...his rejection of the Christian Religion and open profession of Deism." (this and all subsequent quotes, see Against Religious Correctness.)

+Dr. John Mason preached that Jefferson was "a confirmed infidel."

+The New England Palladium wrote: "Should the infidel Jefferson be elected to the Presidency, the seal of death is that moment set on our holy religion...some infamous prostitute, under the title of Reason will preside...."

If it looks like a canard and quacks like a canard, it's a canard.* A favorite canard of the conservative Christian historical revisionist movement, in which David Barton is a major figure, includes the tale that Congress commissioned and printed bibles for distribution in the early years of the republic (it didn't). It's featured in Monumental, a film coming to over 500 theaters across the country on March 27, hosted by Kirk Cameron and in which he speaks with David Barton. Video below: Chris Rodda, author of Liars for Jesus, Vol. 1, cooks the canard for dinner.... (Skip to 3:00 to go directly to the segment mentioned.)

*Merriam-Webster: canard: a false or unfounded report or story; orig: French, literally, duck. (Not to be confused with a Cunard, which also floats but has buffets and is often named after a queen.)